Mike McCaul set to engage on TSA issues

Congress’s next Homeland Security Committee chairman is determined to explore further privatization of the Transportation Security Administration, work on its beleaguered image and avoid internal squabbles among committees trying to get a crack at the agency.

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said he hopes to sidestep situations like Thursday’s Transportation and Infrastructure hearing on how TSA regulations effect the “aviation passenger experience” — a hearing not a single representative of the agency will attend. TSA said the transportation committee has “no jurisdiction” on the matter, flatly stating it would “continue to work with its committees of jurisdiction.” A T&I spokesman asserted that list should include Chairman John Mica’s panel.

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“The TSA’s position that it may disregard the transportation committee’s requests for information, including invitations to testify, seems to rest on the incorrect notion that, because the committee does not have direct legislative jurisdiction over the agency, it therefore has no obligation to provide the committee with information,” said Justin Harclerode, a spokesman for Mica.

McCaul said he’s prepared to work closely with Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who is set to take Mica’s gavel next year as McCaul replaces Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) atop Homeland Security; both current chairmen are term limited.

King told POLITICO in June that “John Mica can say what he wants, … but we have John Mica’s jurisdiction.” McCaul hopes to steer clear of public spats over TSA, a regular in the congressional spotlight; the agency says it has participated in 38 hearings and 425 congressional briefings in the past two years.

McCaul suggested T&I will indeed have “pieces” of TSA oversight in the next Congress and plans to assign a full-time staffer to work out committee jurisdiction.

“We’re not going to have turf battles in the Congress,” McCaul said in an interview shortly after he won the Republican Steering Committee’s endorsement for the chairmanship on Tuesday. “The other thing we can do is have joint hearings. I’ve got ideas about TSA; I know Bill does. You know we’re pretty much on the same page. I think having joint hearings, the idea is smart. And I don’t anticipate that’s going to be a problem.”

Perhaps TSA can explain how any of this is keeping us safe when TSA screeners haven’t caught or even identified one terrorist after 11 years and over $80 billion in funding.

Maybe TSA can explain how stealing our property is going to prevent another 9/11.

Or how humiliating and exposing a dying woman’s feeding tube at the checkpoint despite her request for a private screening is preventing a terrorist attack.

Maybe TSA can explain how keeping a known pedophile, Thomas Harkin, working at Philadelphia airport six months after he was exposed is keeping our skies safe.

Can TSA explain how pulling the dress off of a 17 year old on a church trip and exposing her breasts to her classmates and everyone at the checkpoint is protecting her?

Can TSA explain how having over a dozen screeners smuggling drugs and guns through our airports in the past 24 months is essential to airport security?

We would like to know how having 103 TSA workers arrested in the last 24 months including 15 arrested for child sex crimes, 29 for theft, 12 for smuggling and one for murder is acceptable.

Maybe TSA will answer why the agency hasn’t obeyed the court order to take public comment on the scanners and is now moving the dangerous x-ray units to small airports.

No planes were hijacked between October 2001 and November 2010 without groping children, strip searching women and stealing our property. These procedures weren’t necessary then and aren’t necessary now.

This agency has become a national disgrace and is endangering more people than it protects. It is long past time for TSA to be replaced with a sensible system staffed by reputable workers, not criminals.